west through the moral strength that arose from belief, because it was destroyed through despair, tyrannical foreigners have made three hundred million Muslims their captives for the last four hundred years.

And because of this despair, Muslims even suppose the indifference and despondency of others to be an excuse for their own laziness and say: “What is it to me?” Saying, “Everybody is contemptible, like me,” they abandon the courageousness of belief and fail to perform their Islamic duties.

Since the sickness of despair has inflicted so much tyranny on us and is killing us, we shall totally shatter it with the verse,

Do not despair of God’s mercy.(11)

God willing, we shall destroy it with the truth of the Hadith, “Even if a thing is not wholly obtained, it should not be wholly left.”

Despair is a most grievous sickness of communities and nations, a cancer. It is an obstacle to achievement and is opposed to the truth of the Sacred Hadith, “I am with my bondsman who thinks favourably of Me.” It is the quality and pretext of cowards, the base and the impotent. It does not tell of Islamic courage. It cannot be the quality of a people like the Arabs in particular, who among mankind have been privileged with a fine character that is the cause of pride. The nations of the Islamic world have taken lessons from the Arabs’ fortitude. God willing, once more the Arabs will give up despair